From the article: Let us return to Stalins reasoning during the debate regarding the format of the USSR. The future tyrant saw the biggest threat to the new Union in the prospect of independent foreign policy conducted by Soviet republics, further exacerbated by the possibility of their exodus from the Bolshevik empire. The autonomy that he proposed for Ukraine, Belarus and the South Caucasus was supposed to iron out this problem, but since the path of confederation based on formal parity had been selected, Stalin had to find a workaround. If one cannot bar the republics from declaring independence, one can still make the cost of such a process too high to bear. The first safeguard came in the form of the Kremlin-controlled Union-wide punitive apparatus and the army (eventually Moscow attempted to use it in Tbilisi 1989 and Vilnius 1991). The second safeguard emerged in the shape of Moscow-oriented ethnic minorities (something that the former People’s Commissar on Nationalities cut his teeth on). Which is why throughout the entire existence of the USSR Kremlin pursued the policy of adjoining the territories with alien population into various Unions republics, and on top of that actively encouraged ethnic Russians migration to the periphery. The above resulted in the situation we see today. Pro-Russian enclaves are acting as anchors designed to keep the republics at bay, to prevent the newly formed countries from drifting out of the sphere of Russian influence: Narva in Estonia, Transnistria in Moldova, Crimea and the southern Donbas in Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk used to be UNRs border towns), there are also very considerable Russian diasporas in Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Lithuanian SSR has been offered opportunity to take over the Kaliningrad region no less than one three occasions (!!!) in 1945, 1963 and even as recently as in 1987. Vilnius, however, wisely declined, and in doing so saved itself a great deal of headache. Alien enclaves and spitefully laid borders in the Caucasus and the Central Asia were designed to create conflicts that would require the resolution seeking authorities to address the big brother: Fergana Valley, Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ossetia. There are long-standing latent conflicts over the disputed territory between Ossetia and Ingushetia, as well as inside Dagestan. Clashes are bound to spark in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkessia. There a mismatch between administrative borders and ethnic clustering of Tatarstan and Bashkiria. The shrewd handling of the sides of these orchestrated conflicts strengthens Russia as an empire, and the fact that ethnic Russians tend to be among the casualties never seemed to cause much concern. ukrainianweek/History/127107
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 05:24:30 +0000
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